A Violently Hypnotic Story Covered in a Lipstick of Decay

Sadler Truman is dying in Craig Wallwork’s To Die Upon a Kiss, a stylish noir wracked from beginning to end by beautiful prose and multifaceted characters. Multifaceted, as in at war with themselves, both desperately morbid and exultant. Truman is convinced his death is imminent because no one in his family has survived past the age of thirty, victim to Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome. To help him come to terms with his mortality, his girlfriend, Prudence, suggests they undertake a series of murders.

This book is not for the squeamish and gets descriptively bloody in the deaths. Details abound, as in the two making up fake identities to help detach themselves from the victims, or the meticulous methodology they apply in executing the killings. The ritual takes on a disturbing skew when Prudence gets aroused by the killing. Both the killer and the victim “struggle for equal breaths, eyelids trembling in unison, both whispering similar noises, poles apart in life and death, yet both so alike at the moment it’s hard to differentiate between those caught on the threshold of death, and those getting off.”

Wallwork claws his scenes to life and the mundane is rendered in throbbingly visceral discomfort. Take his job as a censor at a photography laboratory for which he is given no guidelines or regulations. After he lets pass a set of photos he shouldn’t have, his boss flails him with the instructions:

Flaccid cocks only. And a woman’s vagina can’t be parted. Tits and closed piss flaps are fine. Understand?”

Sexuality gets a shade of the macabre and sensuality gets no censor, particularly as Truman is just as obsessed with pleasure as he is with his fear of dying from overly-exciting his heart. Literally and physically, he has to restrain his lust:

If only to inoculate the infection of love before it renders me sick.

His gnawing obsession with death shreds itself on an altar of tattered memories connected to his mother, Verity. Verity is a bad mother and she even puts it out in the open when Prudence visits with Truman: “I’m sure my son has made it clear how terrible a mother I’ve been. How I lied about his daddy, and the poor unfortunate situation he’s now in because of it.” As Verity continues to taunt him, he is consumed by a paroxysm of rage and when he reacts violently towards her, it’s clear Truman’s corruption has gone past the physical, festering beyond an attempt at empathy with the dying. The situation with his mother intensifies as Prudence prods him with questions he can neither deflect nor deny. Even his reflection scares him:

A ghostly apparition in a cabinet mirror grips my throat. At best, I look five days away from having every orifice in my body filled with cotton wadding. Put me in a surgical gown while asleep, and I would awake with veins pierced with plastic tubes; bags of embalming fluid feeding each. Foundation cream would do shit for my complexion right now.

Similar to Othello, from which the title gets its name, misunderstandings abound and spiral into a canvas of bloody murder. Like Shakespeare’s play, the characters may not necessarily be likable, but they are scarily authentic, even while astray, social vagabonds wading in anger at their wasted lives. Truman’s bitterness permeates the pages, but so does a longing for affirmation, for purpose in the meaninglessness. It’s a fine balance that Wallwork deftly juggles and though Truman tries to find an anchor in Prudence, she is just as adrift, a hurricane swarming in another stratosphere. In that sense, To Die Upon a Kiss is as much about living as it is about dying.

. . . for those I sit beside, waiting and watching for the last glimmer of life to abandon each eye, the prospect of a long life is more depressing than living it. If only we could exchange bodies. If only for a few extra years, I would happily endure the noisy neighbors and feeling of loss.

A pile of corpses lie in his wake. Truths are splintered. Even as Truman dispels misconceptions he’d held onto, the melting blur of fear and hate siphon off one another into a titular kiss. Craig Wallwork weaves a violently hypnotic story covered in a lipstick of decay, presaging a conjunction doused in strange love.

A Beautiful, Off-Kilter Viewpoint

“The horizon is a miasma of dream. Ghosts float through its skin and beckon me with snake-like arms. Wipe my eyes.”

There are few imaginations like Craig Wallwork’s. There’s a magic in his eyes, a beautiful off-kilter viewpoint that causes the world to turn in different directions, highlighting the bizarre and the caustic and the grotesque and the beautiful. And he’s certainly not afraid or ashamed to make the reader cringe at every sentence, making us oddly aware of our sphincters.

“‘Protect me,’ said the Minotaur.”

The stories in Quintessence of Dust create a world where Minotaur exist, drink too much, get in fights, and are afraid of the dark. But, more than that, the story “Men of Blood” is a profound meditation on friendship and the way that people grow together and then grow apart. It’s the kind of story where a man punching a Minotaur in the face can make you cry rather than be an act of heroism or a joke. He creates worlds where you can deliver a baby, kill a demon with an umbrella, and have your first kiss while hundreds of demons fly through the air, eating people just outside the bus you’re trapped in.

And though many of these stories push the boundary of possible and impossible, blurring reality’s lines, there are stories like “Railway Architecture,” a beautiful story about desire and commitment and the lengths one goes to for love.

“Three years after getting married, Peter Rankling fell in love with his wife, and about the same time, she fell out of love with him.”

“Anal Twine” is a story that only Craig Wallwork could have written, and, if you can’t guess by the title, it’ll make you cringe, but it’ll also hit you in places deeper than your rectum, somewhere near the heart as it struggles with questions of identity and memory and lust. And then there’s “The Whore that Broke the Camel’s Back,” a story that manages to be beautiful, satirical, and affecting despite its talking camel, bestiality, and extreme body modification. Or ‘Skin,’ where love involves literally climbing inside of the girl you love.

“Her heartbeat was the only noise, a dull rhythmic thud. I crawled into a ball and rested against the walls of flesh, pushed my head into my chest and brought my knees up. It’s the way sanctuary must be for the fallen. It’s the way life is before it starts.”

I’ve read a lot of short story collections in the last year and realised how difficult they are, not only to write, but to arrange. I was spoiled, all the previous collections I had encountered being by people like Borges or Nabokov or O’Conner, so it came as a surprise that some collections, even ones by writers I enjoy, simply don’t work and can feel like running waist deep in molasses, not because the stories are bad, individually or collectively, but the homogeneous nature of some writers can make collections more trial than enjoyment.

Quintessence of Dust manages to avoid this, singing and dancing, breaking hearts while its laughter rings through the halls. These stories are very much about love, lust, desire, and the difference between those words. They’re about fatherhood and marriage, about growing up and growing old: they’re about life. If Etgar Keret had grown up in northern England instead of Israel, he might’ve turned out to be Craig Wallwork, but Wallwork, I think, somehow hits harder and more often, both with humor and insight. I’ve known Craig for a few years, admired his work longer, and his début collection is somehow more than I expected it to be. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a short story collection in one sitting before, but Quintessence of Dust never left my hands. And that, I think, is maybe the most impressive part of this collection, that all the stories work and keep the reader wanting more, needing more.

“Fifteen years later and Milton Ball can still feel the lump on his head, and every time he does, he is reminded of how ugly he is, and how wonderful a burning house looks at dawn.”

This is a collection I cannot recommend enough, and so I’ll do it as many times as my life allows.